“Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.”
Sir winston Churchill
You will find in these posts all of the tips and tricks for photography that I’ve learnt over the past few years with a photo gallery to show you some examples to help jump-start your creative juices.
Some of these come from many conversations where someone is looking at a photograph I’m particularly proud of and then they are shocked that it actually turned out to be trivially simple and something they can do without investing a metric tonne of money in kit.
Take getting a lovely shot of a lightning bolt. The simple truth that it’s a matter of sticking the camera on a tripod, adding a manual shutter release with the camera shutter speed set to “BULB” mode, and then opening the shutter waiting for the lightning bolt to appear. When you see the bolt, release the shutter!
Other than a couple of settings for the lens and the camera, it really is that simple. The hard part is getting the storm to cooperate and fling lightning bolts in your general direction!
I love photography! I always have. Part of that is being hopelessly unable to draw recognisable pictures worth a darn and my poetry royally sucks. But there has always been this compulsion to be creative and when I found a camera allowed a monkey like me to find and touch art…I was hooked!
Perhaps when you see the magic behind the smoke and mirrors, you’ll find inspiration as well and be moved to create art that touches your heart. 🙂
- Creative Film Scanning
I’ve loved my little PlusTek 8200i film scanner…with the exception of medium format 120 film, it’s handled just about every set of negatives and slides I’ve thrown at it. It is designed to scan 35mm (135 format) film and it does it very well…having three trays to hold the negative strips is very nice as […] - Scanning Tonnes of Slides The Fast Way
One of the treasures I discovered in my father’s garage was a huge collection of 35mm slides shot by my grandmother and a tray that my father shot whilst deployed to Vietnam during his first tour of duty (1967-1968). What was shocking was how good a condition they were in despite the heavy humidity of […] - We Didn’t Start The Fire!
But we certainly didn’t have any problems with shooting it! Any decent lens will do to really get the colours of the flame to pop…were I shooting on a DSLR, I’d likely have the 50mm f/1.4 lens at hand. That f/1.4 aperture is huge…so large that I can shoot that lens in total darkness without […] - Maleficent settling into her new home quite nicely…
The last picture shows the eight logical CPUs (four physical cores and Intel’s Hyperthreading means each core appears as two CPUs) during a big export of a little over 2,000 pictures from the recent photo shoot at the Gilbert Theatre. Maleficent blasted through that export roughly five times faster than Callisto would have and that […] - Fall leaves at Carnage Middle School carpool lane…
- Birds of a different feather…
Originally, my eye was caught by the contrails of an Airbus A320 passing overhead but when the hawk decided they wanted to come round and play…well, who am I to refuse? All of these were shot on the D810 with the 300mm f/4 lens. The tricky bit of these shots is keeping the bird that […] - A Laptop This Evil Could Only Have One Name…
The time of great change is finally upon us with the arrival of a new laptop to replace the nearly six year-old current laptop that is finally starting to show its age. Laptops by their nature tend to be evil with all of the hardware crammed into an itty bitty space and this new one […] - A lizard meets the macro lens!
Here’s yet another gallery featuring the 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens, this time playing with a lizard that is holding onto a branch of one of the Japanese Maples in front of the house. I love how the lens really shows you the details of the scales that is breathtakingly sharp! 🙂 - Hanging Out in Downtown Fayetteville!
Today I did my first real wedding photo shoot at the Cape Fear Botanical Gardens…the same place I had scouted a week ago with my sister Meghann. The wedding was for her boss Robyne at the Gilbert Theatre and it was a wonderful ceremony to experience. Mind you, I was nervous as it was my […] - Line ’em up…right before a beautiful sunrise!
October’s special treat comes from the world of astronomy with the planets Venus, Jupiter, and Mars in a lovely conjunction (Mars is pretty hard to see compared to the other two but the iPhone 6 Plus still did a pretty decent job of getting it). Of course, the D7000 or D810 with the 50mm f/1.4 […]